Apple flashed up a slide claiming that the iPad 2 was 2x as fast as Nvidia’s Tegra 3 and that the new iPad would be 4x faster. Benchmarks are clearly a number games and depending on which tests you pick and what resolution you run them at even the iPad 2′s GPU maybe significantly faster than Tegra 3′s. However, Apple neglected to show hard evidence to support its claim.

It was only a matter of time before Nvidia responded. Ken Brown, a spokesman for NVIDIA, told ZDNet that while it was “certainly flattering” to be mentioned by Apple, the performance claims are unfounded without more data. “We don’t have the benchmark information,” Brown said. “We have to understand what the application was that was used. Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmark.”

Apple has opened a flood gate with this statement, when Apple’s new iPad goes on sale on March 16th, NVIDIA plans to run tests in order to determine whether or not their claims hold water.

One thing to keep in mind when hearing all of this benchmark talk is that the new iPad uses a resolution of 2048×1536, so it wouldn’t be hard for Apple to choke Nvidia’s GPU just by forcing it to run at that resolution. The Transformer Prime’s 1280×800 resolution works out to 960,000 pixels — the next-generation iPad displays 3,145,728 pixels. That’s more than 3x as many, based on that fact alone Apple may indeed be right, but it would have been nice to find out how they came to that conclusion.